[yahelc]

Not the same thing. jQuery is worth it if you're doing lots of DOM element selection. If the entirety of your usage of jQuery is a single $("#foo").bind(...) call, then it's probably not worth loading the entire library for that.

URL parsing, for 90% of uses, tends to be a one-off need that doesn't really justify the addition of another library. Making decisions about what library to include is about trade-offs; this library is worth it if you need the query string sugaring or are doing lots of URL parsing. But "instantiating a full blown DOM element" to parse a single URL is over-stating the cost of the activity, especially when compared to adding an additional library to your application.